To Paradise

by Hanya Yanagihara

his leisure was so well-known that it had become its own kind of prison, a schedule in the absence of one.

His path was never his own to forge, for someone had already done it for him, clearing obstacles he would never know had once existed. He was free, but he was also not.

it will give them a certain refinement of the spirit, won’t it? And isn’t that worthwhile?”

age was a different continent, and as long as he was with Charles, he would be moored there.

She had been the final witness of the person he had been, and now she was gone, and her memory of his transformation was gone with her.

When he was very young, he had asked his grandmother why he was called Kawika if his real name was David. All of the firstborn males in their family were named David, and yet all of them were known as Kawika, the Hawaiianization of David.

What he wouldn’t know until he was much older was that no one was ever free, that to know someone and to love them was to assume the task of remembering them, even if that person was still living. No one could escape that duty, and as you aged, you grew to crave that responsibility even as you sometimes resented it, that knowledge that your life was inextricable from another’s, that a person marked their existence in part by their association with you.

On and on it went, the enjoyable things—eating, fucking, drinking, dancing, walking—falling away one by one, until all you were left with were the undignified motions and movements, the essence of what the body was: shitting and peeing and crying and bleeding, the body draining itself of liquids, like a river determined to run itself dry.

He had come to realize that it was when you were dying that people most wanted things from you—they wanted you to remember, they wanted reassurance, they wanted forgiveness. They wanted acknowledgment and redemption; they wanted you to make them feel better—about the fact that you were leaving while they remained; about the fact that they hated you for leaving them and dreaded it, too; about the fact that your death was reminding them of their own inevitable one; about the fact that they were so uncomfortable that they didn’t know what to say.

“I’m scared because I know my last thoughts are going to be about how much time I wasted—how much life I wasted. I’m scared because I’m going to die not being proud of how I lived.”